Retailers generally have the same goals: to increase sales and profit. Retailers can increase revenue and profit by acquiring more customers, and by persuading each customer to buy more products, more expensive products, or more profitable products. Retailers generally focus on their customers in order to increase sales. They try to improve customer service and offer a unique and pleasant shopping experience. Customers respond positively to businesses that try to understand their needs, and who offer better and faster services.
Some factors affecting in-store sales are the number of customers willing to purchase a product at the store and the time that is required to process customers' purchases at the store. Time is often a critical factor. Customers do not like to wait.
If a consumer visits a store looking for a particular product, he or she has to: find a store, physically access the store, find the desired products in the store, interact with a sales associate, and then purchase his or her product. To complete a purchase, the consumer has to first find a checkout inside a store, and then visit a register to complete his or her purchase. Sometimes this can be a long process, and consumers may experience a lot of difficulties when they shop and pay for their desired items.
The delays and difficulties associated with locating and purchasing an item can have a negative effect on a retailer's sales. If customers are forced to wait for assistance to locate or purchase an item, they may become frustrated and leave the store without making the purchase, leading to lost revenue. In addition, a customer who leaves due to delays in checking out may fail to return the item to the proper stock location, leading to additional overhead. Delays and lack of attention may further lead to an overall poor shopping experience, discouraging customers from shopping at that store again. These two aspects—being forced to wait and a poor shopping experiences—can lead to lost sales for a retailer.
In addition, to complete a purchase transaction, consumers usually must carry cash or a debit/credit card. Forgetting a wallet means that a consumer has to postpone his or her purchase. It is more likely that a consumer will forget his or her wallet than mobile device when he or she leaves the home.
Modern technologies are rapidly becoming a part of the connection between customers and retailers, and this new relationship calls for new approaches. Today, more than four billion people own mobile devices. Many people are moving from standard cell phones to internet-enabled smart phones, tablets and other e-devices that are as powerful as computers. Customers are a click away from buying products. For customers, the benefit is all about convenience. Using modern technologies makes life easier. The massive growth of social media, e-commerce and mobile commerce has shifted customers' expectations of their shopping and paying experience.
Today there are systems that exist in the marketplace that allow a consumer to pay for his or her purchase in-aisle, however these systems typically require the consumer to interact with either a mobile-device-carrying personal retail associate that processes the transaction using the consumers' physical plastic payment card in combination with a proprietary hardware device or that requires the consumer to stop at a self-service kiosk, scan a code using his or her mobile device at a kiosk and print out a paper receipt verifying the transaction which is then to be shown by the consumer at the exit to a retail sales associate who would first examine the paper receipt and if necessary enter the receipt transaction details to confirm that the transaction was successful. These systems typically use proprietary software and hardware, such as a mobile device magnetic card or EMV (chip) reader attachment or a kiosk that is used to either take final payment or that provides the consumer with a paper receipt which then needs to be displayed as the consumer leaves the store. Generally speaking, the currently existing systems require the use of a physical payment card and/or that requires an interaction with an actual store associate to process the payment.
Such existing mobile shopping applications do not provide a complete and secure solution for in-store mobile payment and self-checkout. For example, methods involving visual inspection of a paper receipt are vulnerable to duplication and falsification and generally slow down the customer's shopping process.
In view of the above, it would be beneficial to provide a system that allows a consumer to proceed with a transaction for goods on demand, and to do so in a secure fashion that is acceptable to both the consumer and the retailer.